Compact Switched-Beam Antenna Employing a Four-Element Slot Antenna Array for Digital Home Applications

Abstract

In this paper a compact switched-beam antenna is proposed. The antenna is composed of a four-element antenna array based on L-shaped quarter-wavelength slot antenna elements. Such an antenna element is a planar structure and presents a directional radiation pattern in the azimuth plane. Its maximum radiation direction is toward near the direction of the open end of the slot. As a result, the open ends of the four slot antennas are arranged toward 0 2 , and 3 2, respectively. The statuses of these antennas are controlled by some diodes. Consequently, by carefully controlling the diodes, an antenna with several switchable patterns can be achieved. To prove the concept, a 2.4-2.5 GHz switched-beam antenna for WLAN applications is designed and implemented. Its size is 52 mm in square. The antenna possesses eight directional patterns and many nearly omnidirectional patterns in the azimuth plane. The experiment results fully demonstrate the performance of the proposed design. The envelope correlations and the characteristics of the designed antenna are also discussed. Due to the compact size and low manufacture cost, such a design can be a promising solution for digital home applications to overcome multipath problems and increase the transmission data rate.

Conformal switched beam antenna

“…The implementation of a switching network has been used in [4], where the authors utilized a monopole slot antenna. Similarly in [5], where instead a planar quasi-Yagi-Uda array is used as the antenna element.…”

Reconfigurable Beam-Steering Antenna Using Dipole and Loop Combined Structure for Wearable Applications

“…However, the size of the adaptive array antenna is bigger than that of the single reconfigurable antenna due to the use of multiple antenna elements and phase shifter. Recently, the size of the adaptive array antenna has to be reduced due to the space limitation in small mobile applications, such as EM sensors and note PCs [7], [8]. It is difficult to realize in those devices.…”

A Switched-Beam Antenna Using Circumferential-Slots on a Concentric Sectoral Cylindrical Cavity Excited by Coupling Slots

“…The use of switchedbeam antennas is one of the effective ways for reducing the multipath interference, which leads to higher data transmission rate [1][2][3][4][5]. Many researches on switched-beam antennas can be found in literatures [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. A flat four-beam array antenna was proposed in [6,7].…”

“…A compact six-sector antenna, based on microstrip YagiUda array antennas, was introduced by [16]. A compact switched-beam antenna employing a four-element slot antenna array was proposed in [17]. This antenna is composed of a four-element antenna array based on L-shaped quarter-wavelength slot antenna elements.…”

“…A switched angular diversity BSSA array antenna was presented [18]. However, the elevation pattern of the antennas in [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] is tilted. A switched-beam disc antenna was proposed in [19].…”